step 5, today's doily and HDTV saga

I have been able to keep up with T.I.A.S #4 and here is step 5. I have emailed a guess to Sherry, will see how I do.





Today, DH, another couple & myself traveled 4 hours to the Metrodome and watched the Vikings get their first win of the season. YEAH!





During the drive I had plenty of tatting time, so here is the 1st & 2nd rounds of a doily. The thread is size 10 Picasso (a 8 cord thread) in Ladyshuttlemaker's Peach Pandorea. It looks a bit "messy" as I hide the thread ends but do not cut them until I am done. This is a nice thread to use, it works up well and handles well. the only drawback that I can see is that it is a loosely twisted thread, so you need to be careful to catch all of the thread when joining or retro-tatting. I counted ds and there are approximately the same #ds in the rings and in the chains, the only difference are the picots in the chains. I was able to wind around 5yds on each bobbin for the shuttle that I used today. I used 2 bobbins for these 7 motifs. That tells me that I have used about 20yds of thread for ds and some additional for the picots. Since the skein of thread contained about 50yds, I should have enough thread to add a 3rd round of 6 motifs to this doily. As to pattern, it is a simple 6 ring & chain flower motif. I don't know if there is a pattern, and I certainly will not claim this as mine. The rings are 8-8 and the chains are 2ds(-2ds)X7 motifs are joined to the 4th picot in the chain of the corresponding motif based on your layout.





Now on to the Saga of HDTV.


If you have read the previous posts, you will know that we have been able to receive a much greater variety of stations on the HDTV channels. Unfortunately, they fade in and out a lot. So DH went to town on Friday, talked to the local appliance dealer and bought a different antenna. This one cost about $200 and didn't really look any different then our 20yr old original antenna. We went up the roof on Friday night, and took down the $60 antenna from the farm supply store in the nearest big city and installed the expensive one.
Reception was worse.
Saturday morning I went back on the Internet to see what other information I could find. I found a very informative article on this site http://tinyurl.com/3s7n3h newly updated as of 09/05/08

There are a couple of other links in the article to help you find your location and the location of any stations in your area. It helps to find out where the station towers are located and how far away they are. We discovered that we have been trying to use a uni-directional antenna and we need a multi-directional antenna and the towers we receive signals from are located up to 85 miles from us. So we will be returning both of the new antennas that we bought.


So far it looks like the only place to get the one we need is to order from the Internet. Here is 1 site that I found http://www.antennasdirect.com/ it has many different types of antennas and they are offering free shipping for the rest of the month. We haven't yet ordered, and will do some more searching, but this one at least earned a bookmark.



Possible severe thunderstorm coming, so need to close this down.
Happy Tatting,
Ladytats